In environments where sensitive or confidential documents are handled, such as in financial institutions, it is often desirable to have the ability to trace who printed a document as well as when and where it was printed. For example, it may be desirable to know if a check or other financial instrument was printed from an authorized source (e.g., printer, location, and so forth) as opposed to being a fraudulent copy of the respective instrument. Electronic means such as bar coding have been applied to documents in an attempt to authenticate the legitimacy of the documents. Bar coding, for example, can unacceptably alter the appearance of the documents by embedding superfluous information such as the bar code image into the document.